It is not aimed at any one specific purpose, but nearly anything that people do together at work," the company said in securities filings. "Like email (or the Internet or electricity), Slack has very general and broad applicability.
Founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield has called it "a brand-new category of software," and often talks about using it to replace email.
What is Slack? What does it do?Īt its core, Slack's software provides chat rooms divided into channels according to departments, projects or topics. A direct listing "is viewed as a little bit riskier or more uncertain for a number of reasons, principally because you haven't had this roadshow process, so it's a bit harder to tell where the shares are going to open and at what price," said Adam Augusiak-Boro, a senior research associate at EquityZen.